Month: January 2020

Figuring out 18

Eighteen is a gut punch and a privilege. Anna is 18 today and it feels like time travel back to her birth as well as a look at my own white-bearded face in the mirror of mortality.

I don’t know what I thought life would look like when your oldest child turns 18, but I’m pretty sure whatever it was got derailed somewhere. There are sure a lot more tears, yelling, and questions than I thought there would be. Then again, I can attest to parenting karma being real, with fatherhood feeling both incredible and helpless at the same time.

We get pictures in our minds of what life will look like in the future and maybe how it’s supposed to look and feel now. When we want things for our children, they are often what we want versus what they might want at a given time.

Anna’s on her own timeline, with her own thoughts and feelings; I was (and am) the same way, so it shouldn’t surprise me. But letting that sink in goes against some of what we think we should be doing as parents.

If we’re lucky, we get to walk the road with our kids, we can’t walk it for them.

Over the past couple months, I’ve started to learn something experientially that has been a game-changer. Anna and I have had some deep conversations that made me stop and take stock. I was at a workshop recently where our group discussed, “moments of conversion:” those experiences that stop us, make us see differently, and change us. And that’s what listening to Anna gave me: I had to stop, realize I was completely missing things she was saying, and start from square one.

That being the case, we are still on the road of life and father-daughter relationship together. And reading James K.A. Smith’s “On the Road with St. Augustine,” I came across this line:

“Conversion doesn’t pluck you off the road, it just changes how you travel.”

James K.A. Smith

And I hope I can keep that up and make the most of it. Conversion is a day-to-day process and there is a lot of road still to travel. I have a lot to learn about 18 and beyond.

When Anna turned 16, I wrote her a letter of sorts. I wouldn’t change anything in it now, it all stands. But a couple years along, and maybe I see a few things. I am smitten by her gifts and her passions.

Anna is all about pets. She is the girl who disappears and turns up in anyone’s house with a cat or dog in her arms. And animals take to her (until she dresses them up). She’s looking to start volunteering at Talbot Humane this winter and I honestly wonder whether that might be the beginning of a calling of sorts. Dr. Doolitttle-in-training.

Kids are drawn to her. If it’s not animals, it wouldn’t surprise me to see her wrangling kids at a daycare or preschool. She is magnetic in a pied-piper kind of way and kids follow her. And it happens whenever she is around them.

When it comes to art and puzzles, Anna has a zen focus. I’ve never seen a teenager put together a 1,000 piece puzzle. Anna does them in an evening and can tune out whatever else is going on. She is the same way with coloring, doodling intricate patterns, or painting. They are things that brighten her days, and thereby brighten mine.

Anna is extroverted. This hit me like a rolled-up newspaper when she talked about it after a personality test in school. As an introvert raising a child similar to me in many ways, I just never thought about it, then hearing her say it, I looked back over her life with a giant “no duh” and it made sense. She recharges around people and looks for ways to be social.

She is fiercely protective of her sister. I know the older sibling protective thing, but this is something different. Anna has been with Ava step-by-step through month-long hospitalization, seizures, and her provoked epilepsy adventure. Anna frequently calls her mom or I out about making sure Ava is hydrated, not in the sun too long, and is getting enough sleep. This isn’t to say that teenage sisters don’t fight like wolverines (they do), but when push comes to punch, Anna hasn’t missed a neurology appoint, watches out for and over her sister, and worries about her constantly.

Anna feels deeply in a world where that can count against you. It’s a hard thing as a father to watch your child fall down, process, and struggle. It’s a wonderful thing when they get back up, learn, and try again or try something different. Anna has an empathetic heart (at times 🙂 where that isn’t frequently en vogue with teenagers. Sometimes it takes us a while to find our tribe and I know she’s working on hers.

If we’re lucky, we get to walk the road with our kids, we can’t walk it for them. We can’t speed them up and even if we point out rocky ground and potholes, strong-willed kids still find them on their own.

Anna has been my learning curve, my guinea pig as I try to figure out how to be a father. She has picked me up at times when I’ve failed and it’s been the biggest honor and adventure I’ve known to walk her road with her.

On her turning 18, I see next steps, new experiences, more tears and laughter, more dressed up pets, Starbucks runs, puzzles and artwork, and things even a Romper-Room magic looking glass can’t see coming. One of these days I might figure out how to be a parent. Until then, I’ll be happy when she smiles.

A few small stones

Most of us won’t get to everything on our bucket lists. There’s a good chance we won’t accomplish everything we hope to do in life. And some of that could be on us, but there are plenty of factors beyond our control. Does it make our lives less than?

Mary Oliver’s poem, “Praying” found me this week:

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest, but the doorway
Into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

Maybe we spend too much time waiting for the blue iris–the extraordinary to show up, when we could make more out of a few small stones.

Don’t get me wrong–I want to savor the blue iris moments when I have them, if I have them, but not at the cost of the stones all around me. Those moments, the ones we have right now, are all we know we will get.

Two friends have died in the past few weeks, unrelated to each other. Their deaths were unexpected and tragic and they left behind kids and families. I’m sure each had more they wanted to do, to say, decisions they’d love a do-over for. But when I think of each of them, I smile for how they made me feel; for each of their smiles; their stories; the way they approached each day during the time that I knew them.

We remember how people made us feel. I know I need to be more conscious of that. We remember the time we shared with someone, the stories we told. What I know of Chris and Mike is a small section of their lives, but an intersection I am grateful for. Each of them gave me a gift in knowing them and I am glad Christ Church Easton’s Alive @ 5 service connected and/or reconnected us.

As I think about friends dying, we are reading Chapter 11 in our study of John’s Gospel, which is where Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. There is a scene where Mary, Lazarus’s sister comes out to see Jesus as he has arrived.

“When Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed and deeply moved. He said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ They said to him, ‘Lord, come and see.’ Jesus began to weep.” (John 11:32-35)

“Jesus Wept” by James Tissot

It’s a profound thing that Jesus weeps with us in our grief. Jesus knows that he is about to raise Lazarus, that things will be okay in the long run, but he cries with his friends in their shared grief. As we are reading John, we are using N.T. Wright’s commentary in “John for Everyone.” Wright talks about this moment of grief like this:

“It’s one of the most remarkable moments in the whole gospel story… Throughout the gospel, John is telling us… that when we look at Jesus, not least when we look at Jesus in tears, we are seeing not just a flesh-and-blood human being, but the Word made flesh. The Word, through whom the worlds were made, weeps like a baby at the grave of his friend. Only when we stop and ponder this will we understand the full mystery of John’s gospel. Only when we put away our high and dry pictures of who God is and replace them with pictures in which the Word who is God can cry with the world’s crying will we discover what the word ‘God’ really means.”

God is the creator of the Universe. He’s larger than life, the spinner of the cosmos, author of the Mystery, beyond comprehension. And at the same time, He becomes human and cries with his friends. And that is a part of who God is. And it is a way we can get to know Him and draw closer to Him.

In the raising of Lazarus–John doesn’t tell us it was because Lazarus had so much more to do with his life, he doesn’t tell us what he had done up to that point or what he goes and does after–that’s not the point. God just does it. As with so many stories in the Gospels, it’s a story of hope. And hope comes in so many ways at so many different, and unexpected times.

We don’t all get Lazarus moments that we can see in this life. Not all our outcomes are how we want them, nor are we on our time. But we can find hope.

And we aren’t guaranteed blue iris moments. But we are given this moment and a few small stones. And we can build something with them, in this life, with those around us, right now. If we are lucky, those moments, those few small stones we share with those we meet, maybe, as Mary Oliver says, they can be “the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.”